Tag: Lee Lemon Peoples

The Good Eater – Author Ron Saxen

The Good Eater

Ron Saxen

The Good Eater by Ron Saxen, due to be published in March, is the true story of a male model’s struggle with binge eating. This is a problem more common among women, but this young man at a very early age found solace from his problems by eating, and as a result, always struggled with a weight problem.

Ron’s binge-eating roots, like most people with emotional problems, lay in his past. He was the third child of a very strict, tyrannical father and a mother who was a religious fanatic. He had two older brothers and two younger sisters.

His binge eating started at thirteen years old, when waiting for his father to come home and punish him for the wrongs of the day his mother had written down in her notebook, he began to eat the chocolate from the school sales he had stored in his closet. And he felt better immediately! From then on, to placate himself, he ate. Food gave him pleasure. He had learned that anything he could do to please his parents and maintain the “fragile” peace was a good thing. Winning food contests at the dinner table—finishing before everyone else—was one of those things that pleased his father and kept the peace, staving off the punishments and whippings. And he loved food!

At sixteen, his father left home; and since his two older brothers had moved out, he became the man of the house. He went on his first diet; but since his answer to every problem was eating, of course, he always returned to eating for comfort. He became obese, and for the next years struggled with his weight.

However, Ron was very good looking, and in 1984, at the low end of his yo-yo dieting (260-225), he was asked a number of times if he was a model. He was twenty-one years old. Encouraged to try modeling, he lost enough weight to qualify as a model. He tried out and was very successful, until confronted with a problem and returned to binge eating to solve it, or at least to make himself feel better. He put the weight on again and gave up modeling. He tried being a comedian, writing acts and performing them on stage. Eventually, failing at that, having now received his college degree, he tried the Marine Corps’ Officers Candidacy School. He hoped that being a Marine would magically erase his past and solve all of his problems. When this failed, he tried selling insurance, then using drugs . . .one attempt after another to control his eating and thus his weight.

See how, with some lifestyle changes and the help of friends, Ron finally, years later, gets his eating under control, and as a result, his life. This memoir, at times light and funny, at others dark and sad, reads like a novel, with a plot whose conflict I kept wanting to be resolved happily for Ron so that he could stop bingeing and keep his weight under control in order to get back to his modeling. You, too, will find it interesting and moving.

The following is from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (http://www.athealth.com/Consumer/disorders/Bingeeating.html):

Although it has only recently been recognized as a distinct condition, binge eating disorder is probably the most common eating disorder. Most people with binge eating disorder are obese (more than 20 percent above a healthy body weight), but normal-weight people also can be affected. Binge eating disorder probably affects 2 percent of all adults, or about 1 million to 2 million Americans. Among mildly obese people in self-help or commercial weight loss programs, 10 to 15 percent have binge eating disorder. The disorder is even more common in those with severe obesity.

Binge eating disorder is slightly more common in women, with three women affected for every two men. The disorder affects blacks as often as whites; its frequency in other ethnic groups is not yet known. Obese people with binge eating disorder often became overweight at a younger age than those without the disorder. They also may have more frequent episodes of losing and regaining weight (yo-yo dieting).

If you think you might have a problem with BED, there are many programs to help you. You can find help first by simply doing a search on the Internet to learn just how serious is your eating problem and get help early, unlike Ron, who took twenty-one years of trying to solve his own problem alone before he got help. Recognizing he had a serious problem, as he tried one thing after another only to fail again, I kept screaming at him: Get some professional help!

You may visit Ron Saxen online at www.ronsaxen.com.

Reviewed by Lee L. Peoples

Book Review – A Million Little Pieces – Author James Frey

A Million Little Pieces

James Frey

Reviewed by Lee Lemon Peoples

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and was not at all bothered by all the controversy. Yes, I agree Frey should have called it fiction––autobiographical fiction––because even without being told, I knew that much of what he wrote had to be an embellishment of the truth or just downright fiction. As Gabriel Garcia Marquez notes at the beginning of his memoir Living to Tell the Tale, “Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.” (He received the Nobel Prize for his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.)

James Frey in A Million Little Pieces tells the story of how he overcame his drug and alcohol addiction. Upon entering the rehab center, his life was virtually in a million little pieces, echoed by his simple style of writing. Simple, staccato-like sentences, dialogue without the usual quotation marks move the action steadily along. I have great empathy for anyone who fights to overcome an addiction of any kind, especially one that is as destructive as the drugs to which he was addicted. During the initial screening, he admits to the nurse his use of “alcohol, cocaine, pills, acid, mushrooms, meth, PCP, and glue.”

James at the time was twenty-three and resided in North Carolina. Someone had put him on an airplane from Washington, D. C., to Chicago. He was badly beaten and bleeding, and he had no recollection of what had happened to him. When he arrived in Chicago, his parents convinced him to enter the clinic. They had received a call from the friend who told them he had fallen face first down an elevator shaft and that he thought they should find him some help. Given the only choice he had, James agreed to seek help. He entered the oldest residential drug and alcohol treatment facility in the world. The facility, located in Massachusetts, has the highest success rate of any other facility: about seventeen percent––patients who are sober one year after they leave. Both men and women are treated here, and one of the strictest rules is there is to be no contact between the sexes other than hello and good-bye. However, very early in his rehabilitation, he meets Lilly. They fall in love, further complicating both their recoveries.

He forms close friendships with other recovering addicts, among whom was Leonard, a special friend and the subject of another book My Friend Leonard.

Many of the personnel are former addicts: Ken, his counselor; Lincoln, his unit supervisor; Joanne, a staff psychologist.

In the end, James is successful in overcoming his addiction, and that is what matters.